Avery’s Social Diary

The whirl­wind never stops.

Fri­day after­noon saw me in a hud­dle with Avery and her pal Lily at the Patis­serie Valerie, debat­ing the rel­a­tive mer­its of choco­late mousse cake and Foret Noir, which became a moot point when the Foret Noir had its last slice eaten before they could order. After that it was all about the choco­late, and dis­cussing how much money the cake and uni­form sales brought in, and how dis­gust­ing on a scale of one to ten the fish for today’s Fri­day lunch was (pretty much off the charts). At one point dur­ing a lull in the con­ver­sa­tion I men­tioned that the wash­ing machine had been replaced. Not exactly an ice-breaker, as dead silence fol­lowed. Finally Lily’s lit­tle voice piped up hes­i­tantly, “I think, you know, that as chil­dren don’t really do the laun­dry, it’s under­stand­able that Avery’s not very excited about the new wash­ing machine.” !!!

Home to have them run out to the gar­den and do mis­chief with two lit­tle mis­cre­ants in coats and ties, the sar­to­r­ial splen­dor only under­scor­ing their essen­tial naugh­ti­ness. Mean­while my beloved Bob was undo­ing the pack­ag­ing of the new washer, and we were both lay­ing bets on the like­li­hood of the boys’ sur­viv­ing the skir­mish out in the blinky sun­shine, sur­rounded by tulips. Avery and Lily emerged wet to the skin, hav­ing been doused by the ille­gal hose hooked up to the beyond-illegal sprin­kler in the gar­den (severe drought in the south of Eng­land lay­ing waste to any pri­vate plans to water any­thing). I fed them, while read­ing up on how to bone a whole rab­bit in “From Julia Child’s Kitchen,” and Lily’s dad arrived to pick her up, to the girls’ dis­may. “We hear you have been achiev­ing great things, Avery, well done,” Peter said, and Avery sort of ducked in a min­i­mally social­ized way and said “thank you.” John came home and we all col­lapsed with a pizza and then to bed.

First thing in the morn­ing Ava was dropped off by her dar­ling nanny Fati, so we took over. To the park with a pic­nic of, I have to say, really good sand­wiches: duck pate, smoked salmon with but­ter, roast turkey and ched­dar, pas­trami and mus­tard. Plus cherry toma­toes, car­rot sticks, nor­mal crisps and then some called “four cheese and red onion” whose pre­ten­tious­ness I found irre­sistible. The girls rollerbladed to their hearts’ con­tent, and I read Hello! mag­a­zine, look­ing up now and then to find them, or not as the case may be, and feel that they had been kid­napped. Home to play, and I to pro­duce a mam­moth dish of mous­saka for our friends to devour at the upcom­ing din­ner party. It’s a fan­tas­tic ver­sion of the dish, with a layer of egg­plant, a layer of boiled sliced pota­toes, a smoth­er­ing of sauteed minced beef (should also be lamb, couldn’t find any) with tomato paste, red wine, cin­na­mon and pars­ley, all topped off with bechamel sauce and parme­san cheese. Sent John off to gro­cery shop and there­fore many inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents came home: hom­mous instead of tape­nade, sun­dried tomato paste instead of ordi­nary tomato paste, and a baguette bewil­der­ingly cov­ered in all sorts of seeds.

Sun­day morn­ing found us giv­ing Ava back to her par­ents, who were double-parked out­side with a dri­ver, wait­ing to take them to whoever’s chris­ten­ing they had to go to. We headed off to Wim­ble­don for Avery’s sec­ond les­son on the fran­tic Bis­cuit. It was actu­ally really touch­ing: sev­eral of the adult rid­ers who were with Avery last week dur­ing the “cir­cus pony” episode actu­ally took a break from their hack in the woods to watch her this week, and they were so com­pli­men­tary. “Doesn’t she have a great lit­tle posi­tion,” one nice French­man said. “She’s a good lit­tle rider.” It was clear to see that Avery had no inten­tion of let­ting Bis­cuit run amok this time, and that resulted in her being a bit ten­ta­tive, but I think that between the crazi­ness of last week and the too-controlled aspect of this week, by her next les­son on Thurs­day she’ll have achieved a bal­ance. She’ll ride with a group of lit­tle girls! Oh, and you must go on the barn’s web­site where they’ve posted a pic­ture of Avery on Bis­cuit! It’s Wim­ble­don Vil­lage Sta­bles, and then you click on “Children’s Pony Rid­ing,” I think it’s called, and scroll down to the Junior Mem­ber­ship sec­tion. I really feel that we belong there.

A com­pletely messed-up jour­ney across the river with I think three buses, a walk and a taxi ride, to get to Sophia’s house for a belated lunch. Oh their GAR­DEN. Deep and com­pletely man­i­cured by Sophia’s mother Susan includ­ing aza­leas, wis­te­ria, lilies of the val­ley, every kind of rose you can imag­ine, black bam­boo and a horse chest­nut tree AND swingset and a tram­po­line. Avery was in heaven. Within about fif­teen min­utes they had arranged for Avery to spend the night, which sur­prised me after she hadn’t wanted to a month or so ago, plus no Bumper et al. But good on her as the Eng­lish say. We grownups sat down to white wine and a gor­geous chicken curry with gin­ger and orange (a com­pletely sur­pris­ing and accept­able excep­tion to the “no fruit mixed with meat” rule we usu­ally observe), and dessert? As you all know I don’t even have a sweet tooth, but there was the most divine banana bread ever, ever, baked I believe on a layer of whole pecans, or maybe wal­nuts. Susan has promised me both recipes. The bread came from Nigella Lawson’s recipe (as in the noto­ri­ous “Nigella Bites” and the “Domes­tic God­dess”, she now mar­ried to Charles Saachi but still so won­der­fully NOT thin and yet com­pletely sexy). It was, I hated to say, “moist,” my LEAST favorite word in the Eng­lish lan­guage. When I said this Susan prac­ti­cally screamed and grabbed Claus across the table. “Claus, Claus, some­one else who can’t abide the word ‘moist’!” He sim­ply looked down his patri­cian nose. “How one can dis­like a WORD is beyond me. I was raised to respect the spe­cific word one needs to use. If I need to use the word ‘pubes­cent’ I do, whether Susan objects or not.” We just laughed. Still, though, we couldn’t think up a sin­gle alter­na­tive, either in Eng­lish or any other lan­guage we any of us speak, among a fairly lin­guis­tic crowd. There’s French for “wet” and “damp, and Ger­man for both of those, and Russ­ian for “soggy,” but noth­ing to say what “moist” is. A life­long project, clearly.

We ate in the con­ser­va­tory look­ing out onto the gar­den, and watched the girls jump up and down and nearly bean each other. Claus is a com­pletely hilar­i­ous, very much European-gentleman con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist, with a typ­i­cal Ger­manic obses­sion with order, method and ety­mol­ogy, so we spent a lot of time ana­lyz­ing the deriva­tion of words and expres­sions (his lat­est acqui­si­tion is “gob­s­macked,” so I asked him if he had ever been, as well, “chuffed to bits”). Through­out every­thing their black lab Diva was very much in evi­dence, steal­ing the girls’ lunch, try­ing to get up onto the tram­po­line. We stayed for­ever, and then kissed Avery good­bye and walked home through Hyde Park in the gath­er­ing grey dusk, our course set for left­over mous­saka and Spooks episodes. We’ve got to catch up to be ready for Sea­son Five in Sep­tem­ber, although the loss of all the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters is a dis­ap­point­ment. I always enjoy the “where have I see that actress before” game fol­lowed by a quick dip into IMDB, the Inter­net Movie Data­base where you can find out who every­one is and what­ever else they’ve ever appeared in. I gave an inte­rior nod as yet another Spooks actor had turned out to be in some­thing with some­one in an Agatha Christie who in turn was in a minis­eries with some­one who was in Spooks! There are, I believe, only about 30 British actors and they just plug them into dif­fer­ent roles.

Speak­ing of which, I’m not sure whether to be dis­ap­pointed or glee­ful that I missed it, but poor Matthew Mac­fadyen never made it to the Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val. The film did, how­ever, to wide acclaim, espe­cially for his per­for­mance, but the great man him­self… missed his flight. Oooh, how dis­ap­point­ing for the fans who went all the way from Lon­don. Appar­ently the film is ter­ri­bly, ter­ri­bly dark and he plays some­one really dis­turbed. Why oh why? Let’s see him in a nice roman­tic mys­tery next. Prefer­ably NOT play­ing a priest or a psychopath.

Picked Avery up around noon and came home to a pic­nic in our lit­tle secret gar­den. All the trees and shrubs and flow­ers are bloom­ing now and it’s really worth the whole price of admis­sion to the flat. Well, not sure that’s strictly true, but hey, it’s a nice place to escape.

OH! Last story for the day: remem­ber the bro­ken wash­ing machine? Well, it got fixed but in the mean­time I booked a laun­dry ser­vice to come take away our thou­sands of dirty items. They were returned Thurs­day evening. Each item her­met­i­cally sealed in its own plas­tic bag. I’m talk­ing each T-SHIRT wrapped sep­a­rately, each pair of jeans, each bed­sheet and towel. Well, they did con­de­scend to put all the socks in one bag. Unbe­liev­able! And today I got the bill. Just guess. I can be com­pla­cent and just enjoy this as a good story because the landlord’s pay­ing for it. Two hun­dred and twenty five pounds (and 95 pence!). For laun­dry. It’s a brave new world.